Home > South-Asia >> Sri Lanka

Tamil asylum-seekers face death if sent home

The Australian - October 24, 2009

Drew Warne-Smith – An Australian citizen who escaped the largest internment camp in Sri Lanka earlier this year has warned that the Tamil asylum-seekers currently held in West Java could be killed should they be forced to return to their embattled homeland.

Muthu Kumaran, an ethnic Tamil and civil engineer from Sydney's west, was swept up in the renewed hostilities in Sri Lanka, having travelled there in February 2007 ahead of what he anticipated would be the establishment of an independent Tamil state.

Staying in the northern city of Kilinochchi, Kumaran had been working alongside a number of international NGOs when the Sri Lankan government withdrew from a ceasefire arrangement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in January last year, and launched the final offensive to destroy the separatist militia.

Cut off from the capital, Colombo, in the southwest, he was forced to flee Kilinochchi in December when the city came under direct attack.

And by last May Kumaran had been detained in the military-run internment camp known as Manik Farm along with about 300,000 other Tamils. The father of two escaped by paying a camp worker to smuggle him out, and he returned to Australia in August, just two months ago.

With the Australian government now scrambling to deal with the flood of Sri Lankan refugees arriving on our shores, Kumaran has chosen to recount his experience in a bid to expose the conditions in the camps and the plight of his people – so many of whom are refugees in their own homeland. His travails in Sri Lanka are detailed in Focus today.

Kumaran insists the fears of retribution should Tamil asylum-seekers be forced back to Sri Lanka are very real.

Indonesian authorities intercepted a boatload of 260 people en route to Australia over a week ago and they are being held at a port in West Java. "People need to know, the international community needs to know, what it is happening in Sri Lanka," Kumaran told The Weekend Australian.

"The US, Britain, Australia, they talk about democracy and human rights. Well, they cannot keep their eyes closed to these things. "Of course we should take these people in. If they are Tamils they cannot go back now."

Fearing retribution from the Sinhalese community – including towards his extended family back in Sri Lanka and elsewhere overseas – he has asked to remain anonymous. Muthu Kumaran is an assumed name.

During 5 1/2 months among the hordes of displaced Tamils inside Sri Lanka – called internally displaced persons, or IDPs – Kumaran says he saw numerous people killed by gunfire and shelling from the Sri Lankan military, including while the IDPs were travelling to designated safe zones as ordered by the ethnic Sinhalese government.

"Twice my pick-up got hit, but luckily not me. I saw maybe a dozen people killed, maybe another 20 injured, right in front of me," he says. "Every day, in the morning, I didn't expect to see the night time. That's the way it was for everyone."

Kumaran also knew of the death of four people from illness while inside the Manik Farm internment camp, while another committed suicide.

After eight days he was smuggled out late at night in the back of a van, and it would take a further six weeks before he could reach Colombo to fly home to Sydney.

But despite his ordeal, and the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, Kumaran remains confident that an independent Tamil state is within reach. "(The Sri Lankan government) have only strengthened Tamil nationalism. They have not killed it."

See also:


Home | Site Map | Calendar & Events | News Services | Links & Resources | Contact Us